Our Biggest Event of the Year!

These Four Data Points Demonstrate Marketing ROI to the C-Suite

The average tenure for a CMO fell again last year: CMOs at 100 of the top U.S. brands held on to their jobs for just 42 months in 2016, down from 44 months in 2015, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. In highly competitive sectors like technology, CMO tenure is likely even shorter.

High expectations might account for why CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite, combined with an urge to start afresh when revenue performance falls short. To prove Marketing's value—and their own—CMOs must claim their place in the value-creation chain—and prove it with numbers in today's data-driven economy.

It's also crucial to build relationships with other company officers, and data can help there, too, delivering insights that CMOs can use to collaborate with CEOs, CFOs and sales leaders for better business outcomes.

So here are four essential data points that CMOs can use, along with relationship-building strategies, to demonstrate Marketing's value (and lengthen their own tenure).

Say the goal is to generate $200K in revenue per month, the average deal size is $20K and the sales cycle is two weeks long. That means you'll need to close 10 deals each month. If your conversion from responses to close averages one in 100, you'll need to generate 1,000 responses in the first two-and-half weeks of the month to make your goal.